1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording/reproducing apparatus. In particular, the present invention relates to a recording apparatus, a reproducing apparatus, a recording/reproducing apparatus, an image pickup apparatus which record/reproduce data including an image, a processing method therefor, and a program for causing a computer to execute the processing method.
2. Description of the Related Art
A recording/reproducing apparatus such as a camcorder or a VCR (videocassette recorder) records input data in accordance with a user's instruction for recording. The camcorder starts to record a pickup image when a user presses a record instruction button (REC button), and stops recording when the user presses the record instruction button again. Meanwhile, the VCR starts to record a TV program in response to pressing of the record instruction button, and also often performs programmed recording in accordance with a program of recording.
In many cases, the user is interested only in a part of image data thus recorded. For example, the user may desire to reproduce only scenes of people or scoring scenes in sports games out of the entire pickup image. In the past, to reproduce only the desired scenes, sections considered to be important have been extracted from the image data recorded, and the extracted sections are organized, thereby generating a digest version of the image. For example, the following information processing apparatus has been proposed. In the information processing apparatus, a frequency intensity distribution of audio signals is subjected to matching with a frequency intensity distribution registered as an important pattern. When there is a part in which the degree of similarity between the two distributions is equal to or larger than a threshold, the part is judged to be an important part (especially interesting part), and is copied and separately recorded (see, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2004-309920, FIG. 1).